(Another message for GrandCamp 2023 – these are my full notes including some portions that I did not get to include due to time)
I thought the year 2020 was going to be a year of revisioning. God had shown me a new ministry emphasis that I thought we would gain traction with. January started out with organizing a strategy with my colleague. February was a bit of a blur with a mysterious upper respiratory virus that would not go away for weeks and then it was gone by the beginning of March when we worked on creating a communications campaign. All our plans fell apart when the world stopped at the announcement of Covid – a mysterious upper respiratory virus. Hmmm. That’s weird.
Instead of revisioning it was the beginning of a new journey of learning in the midst of rapid cultural change. The first Issue that arose was race relations and I read Voddie Baucham’s excellent book “Fault Lines”. Voddie grew up in south central LA, became a Christian in college, studied to become a pastor, and ultimately did a doctorate studying cultural apologetics. Part of that work was done at Oxford University in England.
Next was a book by Carl Trueman titled “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” (summary here). Trueman is a church historian and professor originally from England but has resided in the USA for over 20 years now. This book explores the intellectual history that follows how we got to a point where a person can declare themselves to be male or female regardless of biology and the world around them celebrates that. This book was rather, well, intellectual. So I did not finish that one before moving on.
Next was The Secular Creed by Rebecca McLaughlin. This book explores what she argues is the secular creed that people are embracing today.
Black Lives Matter
Love Is Love
Gay Rights Are Civil Rights
Womens Rights Are Human Rights
Transgender Women Are Women
McLaughlin does a thoroughly biblical examination that not only challenges these statements but argues that Christianity is the original source and firmest foundation for true diversity, equality, and life-transforming love.
I went back to Carl Trueman but this time to his latest book “Strange New World”. I had heard he was going to produce a more concise version of the rise and triumph book and indeed he has done. While it still reads as the voice of the academic that he is, the book is very much more manageable.
When you stop and think about it, the world was very different prior to the pandemic. It was almost as if that singular event sparked a snowball of change in western culture. I think this was not by accident but rather the convergence of ideas and views that had been brewing for some time.
What does all this have to do with my topic of engaging younger generations? Honestly, for a while I thought I was off on a crazy tangent that was not leading me to the convictions I had about the urgency of the church engaging younger generations. However, I saw the connection through the words of Dr. Carl Trueman.
Trueman in “Strange New World”
“For many people, the Western world in which we now live has a profoundly confusing, and often disturbing, quality to it. Things once regarded as obvious and unassailable virtues have in recent years been subject to vigorous criticism and even in some cases come to be seen by many as more akin to vices. Indeed, it can seem as if things that almost everybody believed as unquestioned orthodoxy the day before yesterday—that marriage is to be between one man and one woman, for example—are now regarded as heresies advocated only by the dangerous, lunatic fringe. Nor are the problems confined to the world “out there.” Often, they manifest themselves most acutely and most painfully within families. Parents teaching their family traditional views of sex find themselves met with incomprehension by their children who have absorbed far different views from the culture around them. What a parent considers to be a loving response to a child struggling with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria might be regarded by the child as hateful and bigoted. And this is as true within the church as it is within wider society. The generation gap today is reflected not simply in fashion and music but in attitudes and beliefs about some of the most basic aspects of human existence. The result is often confusion and sometimes even heartbreak as many of the most brutal engagements in the culture war are played out around the dinner table and at family gatherings. Welcome to this strange new world. You may not like it. But it is where you live, and therefore it is important that you try to understand it.”
This is the challenging reality. If we were able to persuade the whole of the church to engage younger generations, we would be inviting conflict. Why? Notice what Carl said.
“The generation gap today is reflected not simply in fashion and music but in attitudes and beliefs about some of the most basic aspects of human existence. The result is often confusion and sometimes even heartbreak as many of the most brutal engagements in the culture war are played out around the dinner table and at family gatherings.”
What Carl is getting at is that kids today are growing up immersed in a culture that is post Christian, postmodern, and redefining what it means to be human. What does that look like? Perhaps the best way is just dive into some of the cultural mess that kids today are being exposed to without any framework to understand it from a Christian point of view.
Race In the summer of 2020, I did a deep dive to understand racism, social justice, equity, intersectionality, privilege, whiteness, fragility, and more. Voddie Baucham and many others helped me realize that people obsessing over these issues had redefined terms. The words carried new meanings. A prime characteristic of postmodernism is giving new meanings to words. I also became aware that a lot of our high school and college students were being taught ideas like intersectionality and privilege in school. I followed down that trail long enough to see the divisive nature of what are called critical theories.
Our current culture is using justice issues to drive a wedge between father and son, mother and daughter, grandparents, and grandkids. Imagine being taught in school that because you are white, you are responsible for slavery and that you are part of the oppressive people. Imagine being taught that if you are black, you are oppressed, a victim, and the system is stacked against you. Now, imagine going home to parents who worked hard for the benefit of a better society and grandparents who marched in the civil rights movement and telling your family what you learned at school. Or imagine being taught these ideas and going home to a black mother and white father. I went on the website of a major organization seeking racial justice in America and read in their statement of beliefs that they “seek to dismantle the nuclear family”. No matter where you stand on issues of racial justice, know that the very nature of the conversation is dividing our families, communities, and churches.
What I came to understand is that the root of these ideas come from two main sources. Marxism and postmodernism. Marxism teaches that the world consists of two types of people. Oppressors and the oppressed. Postmodernism teaches that there is no absolute truth. It is all relative. Words can mean what we make them to mean. So all the key terminology means something different today than it did when we were growing up.
SOGI – sexual orientation and gender identity
We have a huge generation gap around LGBTQ issues. I have come to discover that if we simply state as fact the things that Genesis teaches about sexuality or gender, we stir up controversy with kids. So, if I insist that God made us male and female and God does not make mistakes, we have a problem. I could compound the problem by asking if it would it not be an insult to our creator to change that. Now depending on their age and context, some kids who have been raised with a biblical worldview would not flinch. But many who have grown up in the church would squirm in their seats and those who are not believers would likely want to start an argument or walk out.
We have moved a long way in the past few years on these issues. The push to view gender as fluid and reject biological sex is not only irrational, it blows apart the notion of family and demands that we reject God. It’s hard to get our heads around how we went from a culture that embraced male and female, marriage and family, etc to an anything goes sexuality and gender fluidity. And we did this in less than a generation. Carl Trueman seems to get at the core of the issue. His books explore the idea of expressive individualism that “particularly refers to the idea that in order to be fulfilled, in order to be an authentic person, in order to be genuinely me, I need to be able to express outwardly or perform publicly that which I feel I am inside. So expressive individualism in some ways overturns a lot of the notions of the self that previous generations may have held to.” “Expressive Individualism requires that society recognize the individual as supreme value.”
All of this ties into how we see the self, what is our identity, who am I, etc and youth today think very differently about these things than adults do. Prior generations don’t connect identity to sexuality.
My wife is a middle school PE teacher. That means two things. One, she teaches all the kids in the school at some point. The other is she has to teach sex ed. She used to enjoy the challenge of correcting kids often funny misconceptions about sex and reproduction. Now she fields more questions about same sex interaction than boy girl interaction. She sees clearly that kids are being educated by porn more than by parents. And (this is the real tough one) she sees gender dysphoria every day in her classes. Over the past decade it went from boys and girls interests to same gender interests to what gender am I.
Recently I listened to a podcast hosted by Alisa Childers who is a mom, an author, and formerly a Christian pop musician. She had Dr Jeff Myers of Summit Ministries on to talk about the transgender movement. He cowrote a book called “exposing the gender lie”. It is a free eBook that you can download here.
Now, going back to the issue of engaging younger generations. How do we do this in a world that has twisted the younger generations minds to think the opposite of how we grew up.
A few thoughts: (in no particular order)
1. Don’t freak out! This is the best parenting advice I never got. I understand it now as a grandparent. No matter how crazy of ideas your grandkids have been exposed to or convinced of, keep in mind that God is bigger, and we need to remain calm.
2. Learn to listen and ask questions. Nothing conveys love like listening. The greatest gift my grandparents gave me was that they listened and asked questions.
3. Share a passion for understanding God as He reveals himself through scripture. Your grandkids should know that you love them but you love Jesus more. They should be aware that you read your bible and pray regularly. How we share this is in talking to our grandkids about the things we are learning or reading.
4. Teach the Beautiful differences between the two genders. (see Why Gender Matters) I think this is the key to combating the trans movement. If we could just teach all kids about the wonderful unique ways that God created us male and female, it would so undermine the trans agenda that wants people to believe that gender is a social construct.
5. Read, research, and seek to understand how others see the world and how that compares and contrasts to God’s word. Glen Scrivener’s book “The Air We Breathe” is a refreshing look at several subjects and how Jesus reshaped how the world views them.
6. Avoid the temptation to constantly correct. Rather question everything that you recognize as unbiblical or antithetical to Christian teachings. I’m not talking about warning kids about physical dangers which we need to always do in love. I am speaking specifically of worldview ideas.
7. PRAY. I cannot over emphasize the power of prayer and the importance of that. All of what I have shared should lead you to and inform your prayer life.
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